VOL. IV (XXI) 2009 - Departamentul de Filosofie si Stiinte ale ...

41 THE CHRISTIAN CONCEPT OF GOD AND “THE NEW EPISTEMOLOGICAL IDEALISM”
its judgment that only the good will is unconditionally good from a moral point
of view, Kant has finally arrived at this supreme point, that is, at
transcendental liberty, which is purely intelligible. Liberty is ultimately man’s
certificate of affiliation to the supersensible, noumenal, world of rational
beings. Together with the immortality of the soul and God’s existence, liberty
is a postulate of practical reason. Thus practical reason re-establishes the
reality of liberty, immortality, and divinity, whose existence or non-existence
could not be determined by theoretical reason. But practical reason does not
re-establish them as objects of knowledge, which would make a science
devoted to them possible (a revived dogmatic metaphysics), but only as its
postulates, as ultimate conditions of its own moral exercise.
This conclusion has arguably exercised a great deal of influence upon
Collingwood’s later thought (especially after Speculum Mentis) regarding the
relation between theory and practice in general, and between the theoretical
and practical sides of religion in particular. Thus, with respect to the general
implicit aim of the ontological proof, he asserts that
[t]he true message of the ontological proof is that the
“essence” of … ethics … cannot be separated from a
belief in the real existence of God. This, then, is the real
meaning of the formula that “the essence of God entails
his existence.” 28
Furthermore, even though, according to Collingwood, Kant failed to
fully appreciate or develop the implications of the “anthropological turn” in
theology implied by his own explanation of a priori knowledge, nevertheless
his analysis of practical reason suggested the importance of the practical
requirements for man’s Weltanschauung, and has presumably partially
inspired Collingwood’s idea of cosmos which can be described as an
“unconscious projection onto the universe of a true insight into the nature of
man’s practical life”, if we are to resort again to Felser’s words.
As regards the Critique of Judgment, it proposes a certain solution to
the basic problem of the relation between the ontological order of the world
and the axiological order, basically moral—which for Kant means practical—,
of our own life. Kant seems to have significantly helped Collingwood in
arguing that mind’s awareness of God cannot be understood if it is not
regarded as a function of the whole mind or when it is abstracted from the
individual’s practical relationship to the object of his attention; “for it is in this
context that the awareness of the object originally and typically arises…
[Thus, t]he intellectual element is inextricably embedded within, and must
therefore be regarded as a function of, praxis.” 29
Immanence versus transcendence
According to Collingwood, Kant’s realism and his conception of
transcendence was even more radical than Plato’s; for whereas Plato had